Can Any Politics Genius Tell Me If This is Bad News for Biden???

To me, these polls don't look good. But I am not a strategic genius like the minds at the DNC.

Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

Quick question. Does this look good?

The Economist

To me, that does not look good. While it doesn’t look, like, apocalyptically bad, and all the usual caveats about polls apply (they are bad, even when they’re good, and also bad when they’re bad) this image, devoid of context, does not make me feel particularly good about the 2024 election.

The details are also… not good. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada all R +2, with Arizona R +3, and Georgia R +4. Michigan is only R +1, which is I guess something, but whew. Whew!

Is it good that the future of our country depends largely on what happens in six medium-sized states and basically nothing else? No. Is it good that the incumbent president is so deeply unpopular that he’s down in the polls to the guy he beat (in all six of those states) in 2020? No. It’s not good! It’s not good.

We are still months from the election. Many things could happen. Avian flu could usher in another pandemic that does insane things, maybe making Biden (politically) stronger, maybe making him weaker. We could get an honest-to-god ceasefire in Gaza that Biden could claim credit for (please do not take this as me absolving him for supporting the genocide for nine months, I’m just saying that cynically, that’s how politics work). Donald Trump could actually go to jail (unlikely) or have a heart attack in court (slightly more likely, probably). These poll numbers will change, they will be wrong, everything is screwy. But when I see numbers like this in a hugely consequential election year and realize that the only variables that are likely to change them are the personal health and performance of a clearly sundowning incumbent with absolutely terrible messaging around his equally unpopular policies… it does not make me feel good.

When Katherine and I were talking over this blog, we identified that part of what makes this feel so bad is that there doesn’t seem to be any backup plan. There doesn’t seem to be any assembling of the bench of contingency planning or even rumored wargaming for what someone other than Biden would look like. It’s probably too late to replace him, but even so — where is the Democrats’ bench? Where are the successors? There’s Kamala Harris, of course, who is currently digging herself out of a similar popularity hole, but who is at least young and coherent enough (sometimes) to appear in public. But if there’s one thing that worries me, it’s that I have no idea what the Democrats are going to do to try to gin up enthusiasm at the convention come August. Is it just the Gavin Newsom show forever? Where’s Gretchen Whitmer? Where is, god help us, Mayor Pete? It’s too much to ask for members of the Squad to be brought into the fold, even AOC, who has quietly become one of the informal group’s least offensive and most moderate members (at least by DNC standards).

Polls aren’t everything, but in my tiny pea brain, they have become at least a good informal measure for where the a given political entity’s public messaging apparatus is at. I see small number I think “party no talk good.” It simple. This does not always correlate to actual votes, but it certainly leaves me thinking that the Democrats are, currently and constantly, completely failing to get their message across to people. Trump may only be +1 in Michigan, but RFK Jr. has almost double digit support, and nobody knows where the hell those votes are going to go (besides to RFK, which, lol). Anyway. If I’m a Democrat (which I’m not), I’m seeing this and thinking “oh dear.” However, I suspect that many people in positions of power are seeing this and thinking that this is “oh kay.” They’ve got about five months to turn things around or face another Trump presidency in the wilderness.